Ok, one big complication from the get-go: I'm playing with Fatdog on an Intel Mac Mini (mid 2010).

Anyway, I used "dd" to create a Live USB stick from the Fatdog64-621 ISO file, and then successfully booted Fatdog64 from the USB stick. When I went to reboot the computer, Fatdog64, of course, asked me if I wanted to create a savefile. When I got to the part where I was supposed to pick a partition for the savefile, I picked the partition for the USB stick itself, rather than the hard drive -- which seemed like a good idea at the time. However, Fatdog wouldn't let me put the save file there.

Where is the savefile supposed to go? Is the USB stick formatted wrong? I also burned the ISO to a CD, booted from that, and then attempted to install Fatdog64 to the USB stick, but then I couldn't boot from the USB stick after that. In the install to the USB stick, the boot loader was (I think) saved to the MBR on the USB.

I is confused. Last edited by jjramsey on Tue 18 Jun 2013, 18:36; edited 2 times in total

if you boot from a USB stick, you will only be able to create the save-file on the USB-stick.

Yet I apparently can't do this with Fatdog, or there's some wrinkle I'm missing.

I did take a closer look at the bit about putting the savefile on the hard drive, and it looks like it has to be in a format that Fatdog can write to. AFAIK, there are catches to Linux writing to HFS+ files, so writing to the hard drive is not such a great option. So I'm still stuck.

It is the wrong user day. People are having family days away
from computer. FatDog has two devs and them usually answer
rather quick. Knowing them want us to read FAQ first I suggested
to start there. i've alway done frugal on NTFS HD the internal one
and never on USB and never on HFS+ formatted such so I had hoped
if you put in such key search words as FatDog USB savefile
that would find many such posts them describe how to do it.

what I do remember is that first time one should tell the OS
that one don't have a savefile that seems important.

so let us first try to find that text so we do it like them want you to set it up.

I try to google and you can confirm if you already have read it and tried it.

Monday I am sure of that some people knowing more than what I do
hopefully give you better advices so don't give up I would be surprised
if this is difficult at all. Searching together we should find it within some minutes or hours So let us see whom find it first. I maybe can try on
one usb flash memory too to see what happens. I usually format them
Fat32 so hope that is okay for you too that is how them are sold here._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

savefile=none then follow the FAQ how you decide on
how big save file and where it is placed. Tell us what did happen.

Obviously you have to change sda1 to what your system name the USB
or maybe the FAQ give advice on what to try there. sdb1 maybe
and the (hd0,0) should be changed to what the boot expect or something that allow it to find it on its own.

Hope my advice is not too confusing. I have promised to only give
advice when I do know but knowing how few that care on Saturday and Sunday I gave it a try.

I still advice you to use the search link in my sgn and
read what advices others have been given for to how set up USB frugal boot of FD. [/code]_________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution thoughLast edited by nooby on Sun 16 Jun 2013, 10:15; edited 1 time in total

Anyway, I used "dd" to create a Live USB stick from the Fatdog64-621 ISO file, and then successfully booted Fatdog64 from the USB stick. When I went to reboot the computer, Fatdog64, of course, asked me if I wanted to create a savefile. When I got to the part where I was supposed to pick a partition for the savefile, I picked the partition for the USB stick itself, rather than the hard drive -- which seemed like a good idea at the time. However, Fatdog wouldn't let me put the save file there.

Ok, I've made a little progress, but not enough to actually get the savefile to be useful. It looks like I was on the right track when I made the USB stick the way I did, but to get writable space on the USB drive, I had to run fix-usb.sh (discussed here). After that, I had a FAT32 partition to which I could store the savefile.

Unfortunately, that didn't do much good, because that savefile isn't accessible during boot. The "savefile argument utility" isn't too helpful, either. It tells me to modify the menu.lst or syslinux.cfg files to add the argument savefile=ram:uuid:B909-8777:fd64save.ext4", but those files don't exist, and the files similar to them that do exist, grub.cfg and isolinux.cfg, respectively, are on iso9660 partitions and thus not writable. I did manage to get Fatdog64 to at least appear to load the savefile by pressing "e" at the GRUB boot menu and appending "savefile=direct:device:sdb3" to the "linux/vmlinuz" entry, but it isn't clear that any settings actually were stored in the savefile.

In an earlier session, I had enabled Bluetooth and set it to run at boot, using Fatdog's services tool in the Control Panel, and created the savefile as mentioned before. However, upon reboot, even after the savefile appeared to be loaded, Bluetooth was not enabled. Huh?

Did the dd operation create a partition on the flash drive of type ISO9660?

Yes, that's exactly what happened.

rcrsn51 wrote:

1. Boot off the CD.

2. Run Gparted and reformat the flash drive to FAT32. Flag it as bootable.

...

Ok, here I have a problem. If I use the default partition table format that GParted uses, Grub4Dos works without complaint, but the Mac won't boot from it. If I use the GPT format for the partition table -- which is what had been on the Live USB stick before I reformatted it -- then Grub4Dos complains of there not being a boot flag (even though the partition is set to be bootable), and if I press on ahead and let Grub4Dos try to install a bootloader, then fails with the error message "ERROR: Too few sectors to hold GRLDR.MBR."

Remember, as I said before, this is a Mac. There is no BIOS, only EFI, so some things that work just fine on normal PCs don't work here.

jjramsey , I am happy that you are in the hands of people
that know what they talk about. But as you see it is not easy
combinations of hardware and software surprise us sometimes.

Here is a suggestion from the FatDog thread.
Gasem has put a lot of energy in a detailed walk through
how to address the USB using it's UUID name and maybe
that would work for you?

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=708904#708904
how to find out the UUID I trust the others know I remember vaguely
it has something to do with opening the terminal and doing blckid
and it list all the hardware? just my guess wish you all the best
leaving you now in better hands _________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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